You want a real conspiracy? Open your eyes to today, not 1963.

Hey, I have seen security where somebody in authority who knows what they are doing is seriously worried about somebody out of authority who knows what they are doing. Nobody wanders into any part of it.

This was not security. It was message management. The most elaborate precautions, like the four-story tall banner hanging from a crane hiding all of Main Street from the plaza, were designed to force visiting media to look at, hear and film only the official choreographed message. By now you know what that was: Dallas is sorry. Dallas has changed. Dallas has repainted Dealey Plaza. Dallas promises it won't happen again.

I don't have any particular quarrel with that message. Fine. It's bullshit, because nobody asked. The event doesn't really belong to Dallas in the way the event seemed to claim. But if Dallas wants to buy ownership of the Kennedy assassination with its purse full of obsequious regrets, then great, go for it. It's a free country.

Danny Hurley

Jeremiah with a bullhorn/and a mighty fine whine.

What was absolutely wrong, lugubrious and obscene was the elaborate effort to prevent anyone from saying or hearing anything that departed from the official program. In that sense, the hero of the day was Austin radio show host Alex "InfoWars" Jones and his doughty band of 150-or-so followers who marched to the barricades shouting "No More Lies." Theirs was the only truth of the day.

Their detractors always describe Jones and his followers as paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists who propound so many conspiracies at once as to make the whole world a conspiracy. But Friday's event was a perfect example of what Jones and his followers are up against — a huge and seamless propaganda machine that masks the streets of real life behind banners the size of buildings.

I spent a couple of hours mingling with the Jones followers and sticking a voice recorder in Jones' face when he spoke to them. Back at my desk, I sifted through the recordings and tried to distill some central message or doctrine, to no avail. If I had to find three qualities to distinguish Jones and his tribe, I would cite a lot of black clothing, a great deal of smoking and probably a lot of ADD.

With the gravelly voiced Jones at their center and urging them on, the black-clad InfoWarriors danced a mad tarantella of ironic eye-rolls and wild arm flinging as they moved in fits and starts toward Dealey Plaza, less like marchers than a circling swarm of crows.

So, yes, I could have taken a seat a block away, watched all of it and come to the conclusion that the official ceremony was dignified and tasteful while the protesters seemed crazy and out of control. But I guess I knew too much.

I knew that The Sixth Floor Museum, as the official propaganda arm for the city on matters JFK, had lied to conceal its role in the repeated illegal ticketing and jailing of a conspiracy author they wanted banned from the plaza. I knew that the word "assassination" had been banned from the event itself, the public instructed to call it merely "The 50th" without reference to what it might be the 50th of. And I knew, of course, that huge amounts of private and public money were being spent to focus the attention of the all too compliant media on the official version of things.

As I watched, I had a great light-bulb moment. Rather than seeming mad or self-serving or especially undignified, Alex Jones looked to me suddenly like Jeremiah, a prophet striving to awaken his doomed people from a spell inflicted on them by false prophets and fake gods. All of a sudden everything about Jones made sense to me. Of course he shouts, if he's Jeremiah!

There is a simple proposition in all of this. If all truth is hidden behind a banner of lies, then all conspiracy theories are true. In fact, the message Jones brought to Dealey Plaza really wasn't about a specific conspiracy, not JFK or the moon landing or a plot to take away our guns. The message I got was a searing, bitter passionate exhortation to skepticism, pleading with us to smash the surface of the enveloping Pleasantville narrative and reveal the scary reality beneath.

That's not a crazy message. That's a sane message. Think about it. What about asking you to refer to the event as the 50th but never say the 50th what? Now that is some serious down and dirty voodoo.

Your list is a good one. My Dallas zine Musea has covered each and every one of those issues in it's 20 year history. I've gotten no help from the media including this paper. This town is tough on new ideas, on improvement, on change of any kind. I have 20 years of publishing proof of that.

kennedy is dead...three of them....lbj is dead....mlk jr is dead....bid laden is dead....saddam hussein is dead....mohmar ghidaffi is dead....jimmy hoffa is dead...john tower is dead....ron brown is dead....most of the folks in the jfk period investigation and the clinton whitewater stuff are dead....and now Obama will make sure that the middle class and elderly will die sooner with worse or no healthcare provisions....we got problems....dead folks are not our problems.